[ih] Fwd: [Dewayne-Net] The Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol

[johnl at iecc.com (John Levine)]

>Gopher's long-term disadvantages were that it didn't support other types 
>of files and it didn't give content with each key-click, while the web 
>could.  That is, the web was multi-media. Also it could do something 
>useful each time you clicked on a link, while with gopher you always had 
>to walk down a sequence.  Only the terminal node had content.

Back when I did the first edition of Internet for Dummies in 1993, the
chapter in gopher was twice as long as the one on the web, because there
was a lot more gopher stuff.  At the time, it was vastly easier to set up
a gopher server than a web server, and I recall at least one server that
did both, generating web pages on the fly from the gopher menus.

It is my impression that gopher died as much because U Minn put
annoying conditions on the softwware as for its technical merits or
lack thereof.

R's,
John